'The Hidden Law'

Twenty-seven-year-old Yukiko Kunishige is a bright, free-thinking
woman who excelled in school until a high-school experience she
describes as "closed and narrow" ended her desire for formal education.
She skipped college, opting instead for what she calls "the reality of
the world."

Today, Yukiko lives at home in Kudamatsu with her parents, a single
working woman, happy with her job as a draftsman in a local
construction firm and determined to continue learning on her own.

In the United States, Yukiko might be considered an ideal
employee--eager, stable, committed, and young. But "the reality of the
world" she will find in Japan's seniority-based lifetime employment
system is far less simple.

The possibility that she will marry and have children makes her an
employment risk to Japanese industry. And that risk factor, coupled
with her lack of college-conferred status, determined almost before she
was hired how far she could advance on the job.

Even if Yukiko remains single and work-oriented, her career is
likely to follow the standard path for Japanese working women, one that
will likely lead to dwindling pay increases, forced "early retirement"
at 50 (or perhaps even 45), and fewer retirement benefits than her male
contemporaries.

For 17-year-old Masami Maruyama, the future has looked equally
compromised since her parents decided they could not afford to send her
to college. The ambitious Kyoto high-school junior had set her sights
on a four-year university, and she planned to work hard at school and
study long hours at night to master the material for the entrance
exams. But now she will have to lower her goals and rethink her
life.

Masami's parents want her to take a full-time job when she finishes
school. "If I had been a boy," says the disappointed teen-ager, "the
situation would be different."

Not far away, in a quiet residential neighborhood near the Shimogamo
shrine in northeast Kyoto, Etsuko Kumagai plays with her 1-year-old son
Takehumi. A university graduate with postgraduate training at Paris's
Sorbonne, Etsuko left an excellent job at the Bank of France in Osaka
to have her child. Though she is happy being a full-time mother for
now, she, too, wonders about her future. "I don't know what I'll do in
a few years," she says.

Etsuko's banking job will not be waiting for her when she is ready
to return to work. And because she is a young mother, finding a job of
comparable status and pay will be close to impossible. "Corporations
don't perceive that women with children can focus their attention
completely on their work," says Etsuko.

The 'Hidden Law'

Technically, the equality of women is guaranteed by Japanese law.
But in reality, a social agenda forged by custom and tradition exerts a
far more powerful influence on the day-to-day lives of women like
Yukiko, Masami, and Etsuko.

These social forces make tacit discrimination an accepted group
norm. And Japan's industrial system--a system one scholarly work calls
"paternalistic in spirit and motivation"--relies on that acceptability
in pursuing such employment practices as differentiated pay scales for
women, earlier retirement for women, and forced retirement after
childbirth.

Education, too, though open and equal in spirit, may reinforce these
gender-based conventions by bowing to the subtle influences of
tradition, offering to female students only challenge enough to meet
limited and preordained social roles.

"There is a hidden law in society that the man has to work and
support his family and that women, for the most part, should take care
of their children," explains Kazoyuki Shindo, the director of the Osaka
division of the Toyo Sheet Metal Company. "That's why our unemployment
rate is about 2 percent and our kids are generally well provided for at
home."

Women who want to become professionals can and do, Mr. Shindo adds.
''But parents, teachers, and public attitudes do not encourage further
attainments in careers."

Equal Chance, Unequal Incentive

All that may be changing--slowly. The combination of increasing
numbers of women in the workforce, proposed new employment laws in the
Japanese Diet, and important discrimination suits in the courts, may
signal a loosening of the nation's traditionally strict role
stereotyping.

And though the change may not immediately affect the lives of
Yukiko, Masami, and Estuko, observers predict that it will force
long-term adjustments in an education system that, until now, has
provided equal opportunity but unequal incentive to women.

Coeducation has been a fact of school life in Japan since the island
introduced compulsory education more than a century ago. The
democratic-minded restructuring of the system after World War II put
even greater stress on equal access, guaranteeing a single-track
educational experience through high school for men and women of all
classes.

Within this egalitarian framework, however, cultural values and
social traditions have colluded to perpetuate what many educators and
women's rights activists agree is a de facto tracking mechanism that
separates the education of the sexes by quality, if not
quantity.

Focus Is on Boys

Through the nine years of compulsory education, the achievement
levels for men and women are roughly comparable, most Japanese
educators say. But as the competitive aspects of high school begin to
take hold, preparing students for the social sorting that will occur by
way of university-entrance examinations, the female students' interest
in school often wanes and their academic parity begins to slip.

This could be a function of the unequal levels of parental support
and encouragement given to sons and daughters, say some educators. Like
Masami Maruyama, many female students find that their family's interest
in school achievement is greater for male siblings.

A 1980 survey of 13,000 students in the education-conscious city of
Osaka, for example, found that, in the 2nd grade, two-thirds of the
boys received parental help with their homework, but less than half of
the girls did.

This uneven parental involvement continued through schooling, the
study showed, widening in junior and senior high school. By the second
year of high school, almost three-quarters of the boys were getting
some kind of extra study help from their parents, but only about
one-third of the girls were.

Edward R. Beauchamp, professor of comparative education at the
University of Hawaii, says that Japan's well-known "education mamas"
tend to be "much more ardently involved in the quality of their son's
education than in that of their daughters." It is a continuation, he
says, of the tradition in which "sons become successors to the family
name and property while daughters are married off into other
families."

'Good Wives, Wise Mothers'

A further educational disincentive for bright young women, some
scholars say, is the unwritten social code that equates marriageability
with lessened academic attainment.

"It is considered unseemly for a male to marry a woman who attended
a 'better' university than he attended," notes Mr. Beauchamp. "Many
girls, despite high ability levels, are likely to attend a women's
college offering lower-quality education but known to cultivate 'good
wives and wise mothers."'

College enrollment figures lend graphic support to this
contention:

Japan's most elite colleges--the so-called "national"
universities and the several prestigious private universities from
which most of the country's business and government leaders
graduate--are more than 90-percent male. (This is true even though
women have a higher success rate on the rigorous entrance
examinations.) The few women enrolled at these institutions tend to
major in only two departments--literature and education.

The overall enrollment of women in four-year universities is
barely 20 percent--up from the dismal 8-percent rate of attendance
two decades ago, but still less than half of the comparable
enrollment at U.S. universities.

Two out of every three Japanese women bound for college go to the
acknowledged weak link in the higher-education system--the relatively
new and academically limited junior colleges. Here, 90 percent of the
enrollments are female.

Junior colleges have become "the women's track in higher
education,'' says the women's-rights activist Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow,
now a part-time teacher at Columbia University's Teachers' College.
About 80 percent of the women enrolled in junior colleges, she adds,
are majoring in one of only three fields of study--literature, home
economics, and education. Even at universities, she says, 60 percent of
the women study these fields.

"Women are vastly underrepresented in such fields as science,
engineering, law, economics, and political science," says Ms.
Fujimura-Fanselow.

Few Role Models in Teaching

But even in the field of education, women are vastly
underrepresented in the higher professional ranks, a fact that other
scholars say contributes further to the poor university-attendance
record of female students. There are few role models in the junior and
senior high schools to encourage girls to try for the top-line
institutions, these scholars note.

In contrast to American elementary and secondary education, where
women have been the backbone of the teaching corps for more than a
century, the Japanese teaching profession is dominated by men.

Today, only 18 percent of the teachers in Japanese high schools are
women, a percentage that has remained remarkably stable over the last
30 years. Nearly half of America's high-school teachers are women.

Better progress has been made at Japan's junior-high-school level,
where women constitute 32 percent of the teaching ranks today--up from
4 percent in 1955.

But only at the elementary-school level do women hold a majority of
teaching posts--55 percent, compared with America's some 82
percent--and that majority was gained only in recent years.

Opportunities for women are even more scarce at the administrative
level. Says Akio Nakajima, the former head of the Ministry of
Education's high-school programs: "Five years ago, the Association of
Women Principals had 444 members. Now there are 500. That's not very
many when you consider that there are 25,000 elementary schools and
10,000 junior high schools."

The Circular Problem of Status

Female teachers are hampered, some say, by the fact that they enter
the system without the professional status male teachers have usually
acquired by attending well-known colleges.

Such status, the noted Japanese anthropologist Chie Nakane writes in
her book Japanese Society, is the real key to the country's
social classifications. That "Japanese women are nearly always ranked
as inferiors," Ms. Nakane says, is "not because their sex is considered
inferior, but because women seldom hold higher social status."

Thus, the circular process that keeps society's expectations for
women at a low ebb may begin and perpetuate itself in school: Status is
largely a function of education; custom reduces educational
opportunities for women; women enter the workforce in low-status
positions where social bias molds their experience; they pass on this
bias to their children by favoring their sons' education.

A 'Different' Employment Tier

But women's-rights activists like Ms. Fujimura-Fanselow argue that
the underrepresentation of women in prestigious colleges and
universities also grows out of the nation's two-tiered employment
system. Corporations provide different opportunities for men and women,
they say, even if they have the same educational background.

Women have "different expectations of the rewards that come from
pursuing higher education," says Ms. Fujimura-Fanselow, and that
naturally lowers their educational aspirations.

Japan's Ministry of Education says virtually the same thing. Women
do not advance to the highest levels of learning, ministry officials
argue, because job opportunities are limited by discrimination, not
because of any discrimination within the education system.

Kazuaki Hikida, the Mitsubishi Corporation's manager for recruitment
and development, admits that women are hired "for a different tier" in
the larger corporations. They are also routinely denied the
"comprehensive and sophisticated training" that would enable them to
advance through the ranks, he says, because of a general belief that
women are less committed to work--that they will reject company
transfers, leave at 5 P.M., and quit after childbirth.

Off the Management Track

In fact, few women ever enter the management track in Japanese
industry. A recent study by the Prime Minister's Office found, for
example, that, although the proportion of women managers increased by
some 450 percent between 1960 and 1980, the total number is still
minuscule. Only two women out of every 10,000 Japanese people were
management-level workers in 1960; by 1980, there were 11 women managers
per 10,000 people.

At the 450,000-worker Japan National Railway, one of the nation's
largest employers, only four of the 4,000 managers are women. Even so,
one official there says the company has "no immediate interest" in
increasing that percentage.

Helping to "legitimize" this separate labor tier for women, says Ms.
Fujimura-Fanselow, are several discriminatory labor statutes, such as
one prohibiting women from working past midnight. And, she adds,
equal-rights legislation currently being debated by the national Diet,
such as a new law requiring employers to "make an effort" to eliminate
discrimination in recruitment and hiring, contains enforcement language
that is weak at best.

And Yet They Work

Still, more than 22 million Japanese women--almost half of the
female population over the age of 15--work. Together, they make up
almost 39 percent of the nation's labor force. And, according to the
authors of Working Women in Japan, a book published as part of
the Cornell University series of International Industrial and Labor
Relations Reports, they have begun to fight discrimination.

"The increasing number of cases brought by working women to the
courts is an index of women's growing self-consciousness and of their
determination to achieve the equality that Japan's constitution and
statutory law state is theirs," write Alice H. Cook, a Cornell
University professor of industrial and labor relations, and Hiroko
Hayashi, a Kumamoto University professor of law.

But changes may not come swiftly, say the authors, because "the
Japanese employment system probably exploits women more extensively
than is the case in any other industrialized country."

Day Care for the 'Guilty'

Changes that may be in the offing, however, will compound the
school- and childcare-related problems already beginning to surface
because of increases in the number of working mothers and one-parent
families.

Some 2 million Japanese children already are enrolled in the
nation's approximately 22,000 day-care facilities--a figure that equals
the estimated number of centers in this country. Mothers who are able
to place their children in the publicly sponsored programs pay the
bargain rate of about $40 a month.

Precautions are also being taken to forestall the development of a
Japanese version of America's "latchkey" problem. Most communities have
instituted after-school programs in schools or community centers to
supervise the children of working parents. In Osaka, for example, 35
percent of the elementary schools have special annexes to house such
after-school programs.

According to Mitsuko Okamoto, who supervises an after-school program
at Osaka's Suita Daini Elementary School, only students whose mothers
work can attend, at a monthly charge of $10.

But Ms. Okamoto notes that the parental pressure for school
achievement that is so prevalent in Osaka prevents many students from
attending her relaxed, play-oriented program. Their parents send them
to juku, instead.

And despite the child-care support system, says Emiko Kaya, a Tokyo
high-school English teacher who is a mother with two
elementary-school-age sons, for many women the old traditions that
govern family responsibilities die hard. "Women are made to feel guilty
if they work," she says, "even if their babies are well cared
for."

Divorce and Work Linked

Working women are also made--however obliquely--to feel guilty about
domestic trends that alarm the Japanese public.

The country, for example, has a rising divorce rate, which, though
still less than one-fifth that of the United States, has nearly doubled
since 1961, swelling the public day-care system and contributing to
increased school violence. No less a source than the nation's Economic
Planning Agency says this about its causes: "The tendency to pursue a
higher level of education and increasing employment of women are
contributing factors behind a more permissive attitude toward
divorce."

Yet a recent public-opinion survey conducted by the Prime Minister's
Office reveals how moralistically the average Japanese woman views her
responsibilities in marriage.

When asked if divorce is a viable route for a woman to take if she
is unable to find satisfaction with her spouse, only about one of every
four Japanese women said yes. By contrast, more than two-thirds of the
American women said yes, along with 79 percent of the British
respondents and 80 percent of the West German women.

Clearly, such rigid and deeply ingrained perceptions of the rights
and responsibilities of women will give way only gradually. After all,
fewer than 30 years have elapsed since more than half of all Japanese
women could look forward to "arranged marriages." Even today, 26
percent of all marriages are arranged.

What is lacking, say Ms. Cook and Mr. Hayashi, is a "propulsive
force" that will mobilize women around the few who protest and will
push forward the government initiatives to protect women. For now, they
say of those few: "The amazing thing is that they keep at it."

Vol. 04, Issue 24, Pages 19-21

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